Microsoft's Mac Business Unit is working on a tool that will allow Mac users to take SharePoint files offline for editing.
It will not be a Mac equivalent of Groove, the Office collaboration desktop client that will become SharePoint Workspace in the upcoming Office 2010, the SharePoint team told ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK. The promised tool also will not offer Groove's existing peer-to-peer features on the Mac.
But it will allow Mac users to take SharePoint documents offline, work on them and then synchronise them back to the server in a similar way to the new SharePoint Workspace, according to Paul Cannon, the product manager for SharePoint Workspace.
"It's not the same product, but you will be able to find an offline client for the Mac as well," Cannon said in an interview at the SharePoint 2009 conference last week.
SharePoint Workspace relies on both the Office Document Cache and a protocol in Windows Communication Foundation called File Synchronization via SOAP over HTTP. The protocol, which replaces the WebDAV protocol used in previous versions of SharePoint, enables the co-authoring promised in Word 2010 and PowerPoint 2010, as well as in the new service-oriented architecture in SharePoint 2010.
Read more about "Offline SharePoint tool promised for Mac users" at ZDNet UK.